The best way to look good in photos

A selfie taken in a less than perfect location.
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There's a lot of advice out there about how to look good in photos — I've written a fair amount of it myself. Hold your chin like this, the camera like this. Smize.

But in the end a photograph is just a recording of how light hit a camera sensor (or strip of film) at a particular moment in time. And if you want to control your photography so the images look as good as possible, you're going to want to control that light.

There are a few ways to do this: Shoot in a bright room, shoot using natural light, shoot outdoors. Photographers resort to crazy tricks to mimic all these effects in fancy studios

But increasingly I'm convinced that the best way to look good in a photo is to find a single, warm, directional source of light
. Ninety-nine percent of the time that's going to be a single window in a dark room. In my studio I use a reflective umbrella to create the same effect.

Here's how it works, and why it's usually the best option for your pictures.